Thursday, November 17, 2016

Oh Poop

It's made by UNICEF and at the completion if you enter your
e-mail address, it will donate 50 cents to the fund that helps bring clean
sanitation facilities to children worldwide. And in the process you
will learn fun facts about pooping and shocking facts about how many people
worldwide have no access to toileting facilities and what UNICEF is doing
about it.

It only takes a couple of minutes to complete the test and
heck, if you are reluctant to give out your e-mail address for fear it will
add you to UNICEF's mailing list, create a dummy account.

And yeah, with all the scam we see on the internet, maybe
the 50 cents it donates to UNICEF is as real as the millions you'll get from
that Nigerian prince and his very large family, but I'd like to think that
maybe it actually does add funds to the cause.

I became interested in the issue of worldwide sanitation
when I saw an occasional stomach turning TV special about bathrooms
worldwide. I wish I could remember the name of it. But I love
how writing this journal sometimes teaches me so much.

In googling around trying to find the name of the video, I
discovered that this very weekend, November 19, is "World Toilet Day," a day
devoted to educating ourselves about this worldwide problem.

"The
Sustainable Development Goals, launched in 2015, include a target to ensure
everyone everywhere has access to toilets by 2030. This makes sanitation a
global development priority."

There are some 2.4 billion people worldwide -- one-third of
the population -- who have no clean toileting facilities, which causes
massive health issues worldwide.

There are two specific things I remember from that video
that affected me so profoundly. One was people bathing in the Ganges,
the sacred river in India, which is also the most polluted river in the
world.

The other scene was the narrator of the program getting out
of a ship and walking through a huge field of feces. I don't know
where it was, or even which country it was in (but perhaps it could be more
than one country), where people just go out into the field and poop.
It was like walking through a whole field of mud. The stench was so
overpowering that the narrator had a difficult time not vomiting just trying
to make his way through the field.

It's not a subject we like to think about, here in our
protected environment with our 2-1/2+ bath houses, but it is a growing
problem.

It is a problem that affects women more strongly than it
does men. Women in the marketplaces in West and Central Africa voiced
their concerns about the lack of sanitation facilities and the negative
impact on their productivity, in particular during menstruation. Public
toilets, even if available, are often unsanitary and poorly maintained.
Without access to toilets, women and girls develop coping strategies: they
eat and drink less, and have to defecate in the open, hiding wherever they
can. They also stop working during menstruation. Women and girls may delay
urination and defecation but it is not possible to stop menstrual flow. The
lack of facilities also exacerbates anxiety and stress during menstruation
and increases their vulnerability. Women fear violence by men in
public toilets and "open defecation sites." (Think about that phrase
when you next use the toilet and think of the people using "open defecation
sites.")

Around a quarter of all workplaces did not have
toilets in Cambodia, and around 14 percent of workplaces had inadequate
toilets in the Philippines. In Vietnam, around 3 percent of health
stations and 74 percent of marketplaces had no toilets. Assuming women
employees were absent for one day a month due to a lack of WASH
facilities during their menstrual period, the study estimates more than
15 million workday absences in the Philippines and Vietnam combined and
corresponding economic losses of millions of dollars.

These kids are lucky. They don't have to walk miles to
get water, though their drinking and cooking water comes from the same place
that they may use for toileting.

It is a huge problem and I really encourage people to do
some reading about it. To tell the truth, when I started to write this
entry today, I had a completely different (somewhat lame) topic in mind, but
when the quiz popped up (Freudian slip. I originally typed "pooped up"
!!) and I saw that it was serendipity that I was finding out about all this
just two days before World Toilet Day, I knew I had to address it.